Comment by jncfhnb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jncfhnb | Hacker News Reader

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> They do a pretty good job considering what amount of shitty, low value, googleable questions they get.

Yeah see this is the problem. Fuck that man. The vast majority of people who want to ask questions are very new. They barely know how to phrase the question they’re trying to ask. If they knew how to ask it, they probably wouldn’t need to post a question. They could search for it. SO is full of elitist pricks who are very rude to people who are trying to ask a question and don’t know how and are feeling frustrated. It’s a beginner hostile environment. And that’s not intuitive. Because you DO end up hitting stack overflow for a lot of basic questions from 10 years ago, and that’s nice, but it is bad for people who lack the expertise to navigate that historical index.

Discord is not indexed, but it’s largely full of people who are willing to help newbies construct their question and then answer it. It’s night and day a better experience. Same for chat gpt.

I have spent a fair amount of time on the unreal engine discord helping what I assume are kids who have never done any programming before realize that their questions make no sense and that they don’t know what a variable is. They are extremely thankful.

SO just makes people feel bad for not being experts on the topic for which they are seeking help to learn.

> They barely know how to phrase the question they’re trying to ask. If they knew how to ask it, they probably wouldn’t need to post a question

this is a big one. often you know what you need to do, but knowing what to search is hard.

I wonder if a GPT powered SO would be helpful to cut down on newbie questions. I've found a lot of success ingesting an internal FAQ/documentation and wrapping it up in a little chatbot. Then asking the bot questions about it. It works better than control-f or some sort of fuzzy searching, and allows you to ask more general questions but still get specific answers. If the bot doesn't know then you can safely assume the question hasn't been asked, or the question is different enough to warrant asking it on SO

They basically did this with https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/07/27/announcing-overflowai/

When I was starting out learning to program I found ESR's how to ask questions[0] guide invaluable.

Half of the time just thinking about trying to ask a good question will usually lead you to a solution, or if nothing else if you're not finding an answer through searching you're probably just asking the wrong questions because the odds you're solving some novel, undocumented problem is pretty much 0.

So usually it's more of thinking one knows what they need to do, just to learn that they didn't actually know what they needed to do at all once unknown unknowns are unearthed. That's where something like Discord shines because it provides an avenue where extremely patient people will do some prodding of a newbie to help figure out what it is they're actually trying to do so they can be pushed in the right direction. But that's also a double-edged sword because searching Discord is extremely difficult and has a high barrier to entry so you're often going to be faced with the same questions being asked over and over.

[0] http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

It isn’t just beginner hostile. The more niche and advanced your question is, the more likely it is to be incorrectly marked as a duplicate.

Besides that, the answers you do find are often not helpful. For example, “just use this function in jQuery” - I’m asking about JavaScript, not jQuery.

> Besides that, the answers you do find are often not helpful. For example, “just use this function in jQuery” - I’m asking about JavaScript, not jQuery.

Since jQuery is open source, I do consider this to be at least a helpful step, since you can then simply look at the source code of the respective jQuery function.

This realization hit me after I wrote my original comment. Somehow never crossed my mind. I’ll definitely try this next time.

This. The more experienced you get the less you are visiting or relying on SO but on other sources. As a junior you usually don't know exactly how to ask or what to ask in order to make progress.

In my mind this was never what SO was for, though - its for specific questions, that are asked well. Unlike google.

Perhaps.

But I doubt this is a value prop people want.

Edit: sufficient to sustain SO in light of new competitors

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